Thursday, 1 December 2016

Beyond The TARDIS Class 1.1: For Tonight We Might Die by Tony J Fyler

Class 1.1 For Tonight
We Might Die

Tony’s signing up for
classes.

When Class was announced,
the reaction from most of fandom ranged from a muted shrug of indifference to a
modest curiosity, with a couple of wails of derision and one or two
fist-punches from the absolute diehard New Whovians.

As a concept, it seems so
very…done, already. Teenagers save the world – as in Buffy, and Twilight, and
Percy Jackson, and Harry Potter, and so many others even listing them is
unoriginal by this point. Doctor Who had such a broad range of branches from
which spin-offs could spring – The Jo Jones Adventures, Ace and Friends,
River’s Run, The UNIT Files, The Paternoster Chronicles, you name it, they
could all spring from the screen. Instead of which, there was going to be…a
Buffy re-run, with aliens instead of demons?

T'riffic…

There was also the
question of whether, even within Doctor Who Spin-Off World, Class could bring
anything new – teenagers and aliens was done pretty comprehensively by The
Sarah-Jane Adventures. Doctor Who with blood and swearing was done by
Torchwood. What would be the angle that would give Class its reason for being?

Well…on the basis of
episode 1, For Tonight We Might Die, it doesn’t have one as yet, outside of the
quality of the writing. It’s more or less teenagers and aliens with blood and
swearing. But – and here’s the crucial thing – it’s very well done teenagers
and aliens with blood and swearing. There’s practically nothing new here:
aliens in hiding, using a kind of shimmer; aliens hiding in the shadows (can we
say Vashta Nerada much?); aliens that look, genuinely, like they’re cousins of
the Pyroviles: child genius who’s socially awkward and badly in need of
friends; ‘nice’ girl who looks after wheelchair-using mum and needs to get over
her niceness to be seen and heard; jock who really needs to get over his own
fabulous, and gets a way that will force him to do so; hot gay teen; teen with
physical connection to the Big Bad, and ability to occasionally know what
they’re thinking, a la Harry Potter’s scar; adult protector, a la Giles, Snape
etc. None of it’s by any means original, but then very little in the creative
world actually is. It’s how you put the pieces together and how you create the
characters that really determines whether you’ve got something that’s more or
less a tedious re-tread, or something with enough legs to make its own
contribution to the pile of archetypes which will be listed the next time
someone tries to launch a show like this.

Does Class have enough
legs to do that?

After one episode, the
jury’s still officially out, but they’re nodding to themselves, smiling rather
more than they thought they would. While by no means a Torchwood, there’s a
degree of realism in the first episode of Class that separates it from The
Sarah-Jane Adventures, which while never playing it exactly safe, was very
conscious of its CBBC, potentially young children audience. Class… well, Class
pretty much takes a flamethrower to that caution, and gives us bloody on-screen
deaths of quite a surprising brutality. Also, maiming, in a moment that’s
fairly Saw Junior in its gruesomeness. What that does to the whole scenario is
try and force the message home that whereas in Sarah-Jane’s world, we were
pretty sure no-one among the main cast would actually die, here, we’re erring
on the Torchwood side, where anyone’s vulnerable to anything, because we live
in the real world.

The main storyline of the
episode hangs together pretty well – there are good aliens, good aliens who
hate being good (think Snape), and bad stealthy-yet-stompy aliens, alongside
and among a Breakfast Club’s worth of Coal Hill misfits, and the misfits must
work together (and get a whacking great helping hand from everyone’s favourite
grumpy caretaker) to defeat the stealthy, stompy, cold-blooded murdering aliens
for now. There’s a MacGuffin of Ultimate Importance, giving a vaguely
hippie-dippy spiritual dimension to the good aliens (as for instance you can
find in the Bajorans on Deep Space Nine), and most of the regular Class members
are changed in some way by their struggle against the well-named evil aliens in
this episode, suggesting fairly well-trodden roads for them to go down – or
more pleasingly, subvert - as the series evolves. If there’s a weakness in the
first episode, it’s that the mechanics of ‘setting up the scenario’ occasionally
show – the archetypes are a little easy to see coming, and almost beg for some
undercutting by the characters themselves down the line if the series is to
maintain its appeal to modern teenagers, and the explanation for the rift that
now exists in Coal Hill school is a little flimsy, to the extent that you could
well say the reasoning applies to the whole of the Earth throughout time, but
hey, that’d be a much more expensive and complicated series to set up.

Performancewise, it’s not
too much of a stretch to say everyone’s believable here – even Greg Austin in
the non-domestic role of Charlie Smith (Clearly, every series needs a Smith on
board). Sophie Hopkins as April MacClean plays ‘nice’ on the side of reality
that resents the nondescriptness of that label, saving her from being ‘That
Nice Girl,’ and Vivian Oparah is perhaps the most impressive of the young cast
as prodigy Tanya Adeola, refusing to ‘Willow it up’ with the cuteness, but
still delivering a character that’s both complex and sympathetic.

But if you’re looking for
standouts in this episode, the prize has to (rather perversely) go to one of
the adult cast members – Katherine Kelly as Miss Quill. She’s pure Snape in a
blonde bob, her withering lines and insults an absolute joy from Ness, and Kelly
plays Quill with no attempt to disguise the character’s disgust for the
miniature humans that infest her life. A reluctant guardian to one Class member
when the episode begins, she ends the story having inherited a whole clutch of
teenage world-savers, the designated driver to a gang of teenage Earthlings.
Kelly’s performance drips with pure ‘Kill me now’ and makes you want to watch
more for her alone.

Overall, while as yet
there’s nothing inherent in the set-up to make Class stand out from a thousand
other ‘teens-save-the-world-from-villains-of-the-week’ construct, there is an
interesting set of characters, each with their own agenda, lessons and personalities
to lift it above the rest of the pack.